The publication is a collaboration between the MIT Press and Brown University Digital Publications
Project MUSE is pleased to host a new interactive, open-access, born-digital chapter, “The Web of History” from A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures by Shahzad Bashir published by the MIT Press. The chapter of the publication hosted on MUSE mirrors the content from the born-digital product’s primary site, and is intended to provide an additional pathway to discovery, as well as spotlight the MUSE platform’s suitability for hosting robust and innovative digital humanities works.
A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures brings together the MIT Press’s global publishing experience and the Brown University Library’s digital publication expertise. The groundbreaking scholarship decenters Islam from a geographical identification with the Middle East, an articulation through men’s authority alone, and the assumption that premodern expressions are more authentically Islamic than modern ones. Aimed at a wide international audience, the publication consists of engaging stories and audiovisual materials that will enable readers at all levels to appreciate Islam as an aspect of global history for centuries.
“Project MUSE enthusiastically supports projects that apply digital technologies to scholarship and pedagogy in the humanities,” said Kelley Squazzo, Director of Publisher Relations at Project MUSE. “We are excited to host Shahzad Bashir’s chapter and to ensure the full publication is discovered, experienced, and cited by researchers around the globe.”
“Through multimedia enhancements and an interactive navigation system, A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures allows for engagement with rich visual material and multimedia evidence not possible in a printed volume,” explains Amy Brand, Director and Publisher, the MIT Press. “We are thrilled to partner with Project MUSE to increase the access, impact, and audience of this groundbreaking work.”
“Dynamic scholarly forms, such as Shahzad Bashir’s multimodal digital monograph, are transforming intellectual creativity and reader engagement,” said Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications. “We are delighted to collaborate once again with Project MUSE to bring cutting-edge, open-access content to the broadest audience possible.”
Brown University Digital Publications is in the vanguard of digital monograph publishing, facilitating the creation and validation of new scholarly forms that demonstrate a range of ways in which the digital environment is necessary for articulating and advancing scholarly argument beyond the capabilities of print. With oversight from Allison Levy and drawing on the expertise of the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship, faculty at Brown are enabled to develop their scholarship in ways that take advantage of emerging digital methods and formats. These pathbreaking scholarly works are then submitted to leading university presses that have corresponding academic interests and the infrastructure for peer review and digital publication.
About Project MUSE
Project MUSE has offered libraries affordable access to essential humanities and social science research for more than 25 years, as an integral part of the scholarly communications ecosystem and platform of choice for respected not-for-profit publishers. Currently, Project MUSE is the trusted and reliable source for over 800 journals and over 85,000 books, from more than 200 of the world’s leading university presses and scholarly societies. MUSE also hosts thousands of open access books and several open access journal titles, freely available to anyone worldwide.
About Brown University Digital Publications
Brown University Digital Publications—a collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities—creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, university-based approach to digital content development is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.